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No other magazine in print would run 2,000 words on the odyssey faced by artisanal bakers who choose to travel with their precious sourdough starters rather than let them perish, first getting the oozing jars through TSA and then feeding them in lonely motel rooms. It asked Anthony Bourdain, pre-Kitchen Confidential, to file something on the opening of Brasserie Les Halles in Tokyo. He turned in a nearly 5,000-word gonzo masterpiece, filled with pre-millennium jet lag and references to things like Apocalypse Now, super-fatty toro, and Krispy Kreme. It put women chefs on the cover decades before Time magazine’s “Gods of Food” debacle, like it was no big thing. It wasn’t, for Food Arts.

Food Arts was not written for mass consumption. It occupied a niche, and a relatively small one, but its influence was inversely proportional to that. It will be sorely missed. Missed enough to be reincarnated? Hmm…